Wasn’t there a sci-fi anthology series (maybe Black Mirror?) that had an episode, where a high-tech wizard used robot bees as weapons (particularly nasty ones)?
If you ever hear new robot + useful task always assume it's a cover story for weapons delivery. Why do you think so many new robots are advertised as great for "search and rescue after a disaster"? Its one config file away from search and kill in a war zone.
Insect-bots are the penultimate search and kill. Also the penultimate mass kill. The ultimate would have to be nanobots if we can ever get to reliable swarms of them.
But it’s not the weapons that interest me so much as what people come up with as countermeasures. It’ll be fascinating to watch the next few years.
This robotic pollinator can barely even fly for 45 sec, they cannot scale it sufficiently they can just say minidrone but to even think about using it as an actual pollinator and the economics making sense is at the present far far away.
If you travel and see how people live in very large cities, especially in Asian countries, you'll find that interacting with any sort of nature is already optional for many people. These people won't notice. The indiscriminate pesticides will continue to flow, killing the natural bee/insect populations, with a slow transition to artificial pollination being an efficiency quirk of modern farming.
My mother used to work in social care for underprivileged city kids and she told me a story once where they took the kids to a farm. They were astonished that milk came from a cow.
I basically have to fly to the Canary Islands to see starlight.
"The envisioned indoor farm would grow fruits and vegetables inside a multilevel warehouse, maximizing yield per acre while minimizing environmental impacts through a controlled, closed-loop system."
Yeah, all our pollution and climate change is disrupting ecosystems.
Our only way to ensure survival on and off the planet is to mimic their actions (in this case pollination) to ensure that if we do manage to push more and more species to extinction we have options for being able to continue after they are gone.
Found this video on the MIT Robotics YouTube page of some of the robots Kevin Chen was working on from a year ago, but I couldn’t find any videos of the new on on YouTube.
> Is it possible to create a lawn weed killer (a broadleaf herbicide) that doesn't kill white dutch clover; because bees eat clover (and dandelions) and bees are essential?"
> [ Dandelion rubber is a sustainable alternative to microplastic tires ]
> Pesticides, especially neonicotinoids, have been investigated in relation to risks for bees such as Colony Collapse Disorder. A 2018 review by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) concluded that most uses of neonicotinoid pesticides such as clothianidin represent a risk to wild bees and honeybees. [5][6] Neonicotinoids have been banned for all outdoor use in the entire European Union since 2018, but has a conditional approval in the U.S. and other parts of the world, where it is widely used. [7][8]
TIL dish soap kills wasps, yellow jackets, hornets nearly on contact.
Ordered it; can't wait till it arrives Saturday. FWIW, I find HN book recommendations/mentions a constant source of mostly arcane titles I'd never come across anywhere else. True for movies as well.
